Hindawi Publishing Corporation Case Reports in Medicine

Copyright © 2013 Matteo Landriscina et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Skeletal muscle metastases are very rare events in colorectal carcinoma. By contrast, dermatomyositis is an idiopathic inflammatory myopathy with characteristic cutaneous manifestations and a well-recognized association with several human malignancies and, among others, colorectal cancer. Here, we report the case of a 71-year-old woman with paraneoplastic dermatomyositis followed by the development of ametastatic colon cancer. Interestingly, this patient developedmultiple skeletal metastases whichwere preceded by the worsening of systemic symptoms of dermatomyositis. This observation suggests that, while muscle tissue is usually resistant to the development of tumor metastases, the inflammatory and immune response which characterizes and boosts paraneoplastic myopathy may represent a favorable soil for tumor cell invasion and metastasization to skeletal muscles. 1